Paranoia and car seats

So, as a soon-to-be parent, I'm supposed to be spending vast amounts of my time worrying about safety equipment like car seats and up-armored Japanese-constructed minivans and the like. Never mind that my parents just duct-taped me to the radio antenna on their 1915 Mercedes coupe for the drive home and I turned out just fine (now get off my lawn).

We looked at car seats, registered for the latest model from a brand that got high marks in Baby Bargains (Hey, look at all those registries over on the right! doesn't that put you in a buying mood?), and I basically put that out of my mind, until I have to install it.

But I couldn't miss the recent kerfuffle over flawed car seat testing in Consumer Reports.

Summary for those of you out of the infant-raising set: Consumer Reports (quite sensibly) thought it would be a good idea to test infant car seats in side impact accidents the same way new cars are tested. They released the results of these tests to much fanfare: Almost every seat tested failed, two so spectacularly that CR demanded they be recalled.

Less than two weeks later, CR retracted their report, after discovering that their independent lab hadn't tested what they wanted -- instead of testing at the 38 MPH standard, they'd tested 70 MPH side impacts. The link to CR above is their apology and analysis of what went wrong, which was admirable.

What got me to thinking, though, is that the problematic testing has brought out the worst sort of parental paranoia. I've seen Internet stories, true or not, of parents dumping their car seats for one of the two that "passed" the 70 MPH test; blog and message board posts along the lines of "so that means I should get one of those two, right?"; and I've talked with at least a couple of parents who proudly pointed at their infant seat and said, "That one passed the CR test."

I'm usually not the type to get in arguments in person, but I really wanted to tell these folks: Unless you're in the habit of having your car hoisted into the middle of an Interstate by helicopter, 70 MPH side impacts into your stationary vehicle are not a situation you're ever likely to encounter.

Not to mention, you can't test what would really happen in a 70 MPH side impact without testing the exact models of vehicles involved in the accident. CR explains that most injuries at that speed are caused by "intrusion," which is weasel-wording for "The car going 70 rips clean through the car going zero and your restraints become useless." Of course how bad the accident ends up depends on all sorts of variables; but that's exactly why it can't be accurately tested.

If you do happen to be that unlucky -- let's say you're making a left when someone blows through the light at twice the speed limit in their invisible car -- anyone who leaves the scene of the accident is going to have to be really lucky, infant seat or no.

You might as well test infant seats by dropping the Monty Python 16-ton weight on them, for how useful this information would be in the real world. And yet...people still want to put stock in these tests, still want to believe that when the one in a million shot hits, that they can do something about it.

I realize that with one of our kids still in the oven and the other probably not conceived yet, we haven't had the virtual lobotomy that overcomes parents on the subject of safety. I fully expect this to be the first post that brings me the dreaded "You'll understand when you have kids" comment. (If you considered writing that comment, consider this your preemptive "Bite Me."

But the simple fact is, this isn't a fight-or-flight, daddy-bird-defending-the-nest scenario that calls for instinctive overreaction. My kids don't need a parent who can't think clearly, who reacts mindlessly and trusts anything he reads on the Internet because it's "for the kids" or "better safe than sorry."

Aside from being far too long, this post is my reminder to myself that while a little paranoia about my kids might be good -- I won't be telling them to run out in the street just because a car wasn't there yesterday -- a lot of this life, and probably 80% of what happens to my kids over the courses of their lives, will be outside my control. The sooner I'm at peace with that, the better.